So how does this amazing 1962 breakthrough benefit me?






Okay. You're starting to get old if you remember phones where you put a finger in the dial and spun it, and listened to the whirrrrclick. Or if you remember phone booths where you could get in and close the door.

You're getting really old if you remember party lines. ("Could you get off, Jimmy? I'm trying to talk to someone important?")

You're getting REALLY old if you remember turning the crank on the side of the phone and going, "Hello, Mabel? Get me Doc Finster."

Before that, it was going to the telegraph office and tapping the little key. Dit..dit..dit ditt ditt.. dash.. Dang, messed up... ditt...

Well, hopefully this won't be as blindingly easy as yesterday's guest [looks away in embarrassment, whistles innocently]. An artist who deserves much more fame and credit than he seems to get lately.

And here's Surprise Package again. Maybe something sweet and adorable, maybe something nightmarish. Could go either way.


( ? )

In the 1970s and 1980s, martial arts fever blazed in Western culture. There were a dozen magazines on the stands each month... FIGHTING STARS, KARATE ILLUSTRATED, BLACK BELT, INSIDE KUNG FU, SECRETS OF KUNG FU, ORIENTAL FIGHTING ARTS, many more (some of which only lasted a few issues). My huge collections of these have been long since sold off or discarded, mostly because of all the room they took up (hey! there's a window in this room I forgot about). But
the few copies I still retain give a glimpse into a mania that has never completely faded.



Looking at the ads, I'm struck by how easy it was to mail away for throwing stars, swords, sai (those big forklike weapons), spears and nunchakus. Not plastic toys, either; these were made of hardwood and steel. Somehow I don't see the Post Office cheerfully handing over your noonchucks so easily these days. And Chuck Norris had a point. The tight-fitting denim jeans of the 1970s would make it hard to kick someone in the face. Luckily, he had a solution.

One thing I love about Golden and Silver Age comics is their dreamlike, anything-goes quality. They're like fairy tales in that respect. The most outrageous events are regarded with a straight face. The Earth is sliced neatly in half or swapped with another planet, with no real disastrous effects; people can be frozen inside a block of ice for hours and then thawed out, alive and well; a person can shrink to six inches tall or grow to be twenty feet tall and just smirk at the cube-square law. The reader (supposed to be ten or eleven years old) would just say, "Awesome!" and enjoy the shenanigans.

This sequence is from THE FANTASTIC FOUR# 6, September 1962. Script by Stan Lee and art by Jack Kirby (with Dick Ayers on inks). Dr Doom is at it again. He has manipulated Sub-Mariner into planting a ridiculously-powerful magnetic device in the basement of the Baxter Building and, once the FF and Namor are assembled, he triggers the device. The gadget (wait for it) rips the entire building loose of its foundations and hauls it up into space.



As a kid reading this, I had no problem with the practicality of this. For all I knew as a preteen, a skyscraper was built well enough that it could be yanked out of the ground like a tent peg and not fall apart. But even then, I knew that big buildings had plumbing and electrical work. What happened to the power lines going on? Did all the pipes snap off, flooding the street with water and (teehee) sewage? I had seen some giant monster movies by that age and had an idea that there was a lot of rubble crashing when you knocked big buildings around.




Is this a great splash page or what? To a ten year old it was pure awesomemess and I still grin at the audacity. The angle of the building as we look down gives perspective, Manhattan is drawn with just enough detail and the squadron of jets flying by underneath the flying building is a perfect touch. Jack Kirby, nobody like him. Looking at it today as a middle-aged adult though, I'm curious to know what sort of conversations are going on in the jet cockpits.

Then, as the adventure winds down, the Baxter Building settles back to its original site without a single broken window and cracked brick. Amazing. I picture the next few days will see an army of repairmen hooking everything up again, but never mind that now. That caption is pure Stan Lee. "There's a skyscraper lowering down out of the sky," thinks a passing cab driver, "but that can't be-- it must be that the Cuban Missile Crisis has me so upset I'm imagining things." Love it, it's as perfect in its way as the closing narration of a 1950's sci-fi movie.

From December 1952...



There you are, standing in London's exclusive He-Man Adventurer Club. The servants have brought brandy and cigars. Lord Greystoke recalls how he killed a lion with just his father's knife. Clark Savage Jr then recounts his barehanded victory over a polar bear. Jungle Jim, Congo Bill, Simon Templar, Hugh Drummond... they all reminisce about their daring struggles against gorillas, tigers, elephants, pythons, rhinos. Then they turn expectantly to you.

"I... ah, I killed a big otter once."

Embarassed throat-clearing harumphs. Someone mentions the weather is dreadful this time of year and they start discussing that.

(Nov 13, 2006)

Pretty dismal but not completely hopeless. Let's face it, if you're a hardened Old School monster movie fan, you've suffered through many tedious hours of talking heads and stock footage just to see a few minutes of a guy in make-up run around grabbing up women, or an iguana with a rubber fin glued to its back wrestle a baby alligator. GIGANTIS, on the other hand, does deliver the good with two incredibly huge creatures fighting to the death and destroying a city while doing it. Of course, the movie itself is a botched five-car pileup but you can't have everything.

This flick started life as Toho's sequel to the very successful GOJIRA (known here as GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS). Its Japanese title GOJIRA NO GYAKUSHYU translates to GODZILLA II: THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL! GODZILLA'S COUNTER-ATTACK or GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN, both of which make the monster sound like a commando. Problems with rights to the name led to this picture being released as GIGANTIS, THE FIRE MONSTER (which is how I saw it as a precocious rugrat way back when) and it was jacked around in a way that suggested the editors hated the whole job and wanted to get fired. (The original film is now available and I really ought to check it out.)

Aside from the unending moronic narration, cutting back of character development, substitution of old music from KRONOS for the original score and probably making the theatres sell stale popcorn just to ruin the experience completely, the American studio couldn't add anything as bizarre as the scene where a white-bearded and wig-wearing expert informs Japan's police and scientific leaders what has surfaced. His dialogue is astoundingly bad, so atrocious that I defy any kaiju buff to sit through them with a straight face.

"Horrors in the world of science are part of nature's plan," he begins. (What the...?). The pair of battling monsters are identified, using one of those illustrated Golden Books for children (yes, seriously). The expert says dinosaurs were "murderers, original plundering murderers who killed everything in their way... These boys are both Gigantis and Angurus."

Shown newsreel footage of the original Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo a few years earlier, one guy in uniform asks, "Didn't you finally manage to destroy him?" No, genius, you think you might have noticed him if he were still crashing around Japan.

On the plus side, the movie has Gigantis and Angurus really go at it. The fights scenes between kaiju like these are usually slowed down to make the creatures seemed believably ponderous. (After all, you don't expect to see an elephant scurry by as fast a chipmunk.) This time, though, the battling is shown at normal speed. Sometimes it really drives home the sad truth that we're watching two exhausted, sweaty Japanese men in heavy rubber suits climbing on each other. But it also makes it seem that the monsters seriously hate each other and can't wait to go at it. They also tangle a lot more like animals than like WWF stars; there's a lot of scratching and kicking and biting. In fact, Gigantis kills Angurus with a serious chomp to the base of the neck that draws gallons of blood. This is actually kind of shocking, since we're used to seeing Godzilla using shoulder throws and haymakers on his opponents after the next picture.
I like Gigantis' different look, too. He has a longer neck and slimmer body than the classic Godzilla, and some wicked fangs that curve out.

Like the Universal horror films of the 1940s, there's a more-or-less continuity between Godzilla movies (although details sometimes don't quite come out right). It's clear that the gigantic beast that levelled Tokyo and was killed by the Oxygen Destroyer in GOJIRA did in fact die. This is a different specimen of the same species, and you do have to wonder why Gigantis (or Gojira II) also has radioactive steam breath. There must be a backstory there. Evidently a number of prehistoric animals were mutated and released from their sleep by atomic testing at the same time. Imagine a possible scene where a satellite photo shows a remote colony of Godzillas breeding and raising young...!

As it is, the final scene has Gigantis being buried under what looks exactly like a cascade of ice cubes, blasted loose by fighter jets. Years later in KING KONG VS GODZILLA, the island where the beast was frozen must have broken loose and drifted into warmer waters. Here, when he struggled out of the ice, he began in earnest his long career of trampling cities, tangling with other giant monsters and generally being obnoxious. It was this scene that Blue Oyster Cult had in mind.

The deal with Surprise Package is that you have to take your chances. It could be a cute little kitten sleeping on the couch, it could be a tapeworm being extracted. Maybe it's one of the charming and nubile Rasmussen girls, maybe it's autopsy results. It's just a question of how curious you are.
,
( ? )

The Air Force is not exactly eager for this to become public knowledge, but documents recently declassified under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that fighter pilots flying near their jets' working ceiling seem to be suffering recurring hallucinations. Perhaps related to the Gremlins and Foo Fighters of earlier times, the "Catjet" is unnerving to see, even if the pilot is rationally aware of what's causing the sight. Improvements in cabin pressure and oxygen feed hopefully will end this phenomenon.

This panel is from THE SPECTRE# 7, December 1968. It was a short back-up story featuring Hourman, one of the hard-luck characters of the Golden Age. Hourman started off okay, with covers on ADVENTURE COMICS and a charter membership in the Justice Society over in ALL-STAR COMICS. But he just never hit it big, and got bumped off the cover by Starman. Where Flash and Green Lantern won their own titles and moved up to honorary membership, Hourman took "a leave of absence" and was not seen again until the grand revivals of the 1960s. I liked Hourman, he was no worse than most of the other second-string 1940s heroes. His schtick was that he was a genuinely meek and mousy who chemist who took a chemical of his own devising, Miraclo. For one hour, he had enhanced speed and strength and also became bold and assertive. Personally, I think it was not the brightest thing to call himself Hourman... it kind of gave a big clue to the secret that his powers only lasted an hour. Why give this away? Let crooks think you were always superhuman.



Be that as it may, this panel shows the last second of a typically suspenseful sequence as Hourman has been racing to find an antidote. If he doesn't get it before his powers fade out, he'll die and (as usual in melodrama) he just manages to whip up the antidote and chug it down at the literal last second. You see stuff like this not only in comics but in movies and paperbacks, where drugs seem to have a timer to them that is accurate to the second. If someone is given a poison that works in twenty-four hours, it kills him exactly twenty-four hours later. If he gets the antidote at twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds, he's fine. It'll be as if he was never poisoned at all. Well, I suppose it makes for suspense but it never seemed plausible to me. On the other hand, I can see why James Bond doesn't get a hold of the lifesaving drug just before he'll croak, gulp it down and collapse anyway to wake up in the hospital with the doctor saying he'll live but there's permanent nerve damage from the poison that almost killed him. Oh, and his kidneys are barely functional. Kind of a downer.

In Hourman's case, his Miraclo buzz was so accurately timed that Gardner Fox used to include as little caption box indicating how long it had been since he had taken the pill. After the effects wore off, Hourman had to wait an hour before taking a second Miracle pill. To me, this kind of hinted there was a dangerous side to this Miraclo stuff that wasn't mentioned and which kept him from just staying charged up as long as necessary. I imagine him at a Justice Society meeting as Dr Fate and Hawkman and the others were all eager to rush out and beat up Axis agents, saying, "Gosh, fellas.. I, uh, have to wait another twenty minutes to get my powers. You guys go ahead and I'll catch up, okay?"

My laptop is fine, it's good for my purposes. But what I really want is something that takes up a whole room and uses hundreds of dollars worth of electricity each month. It must have those big spinning reels of tape and a front panel with random blinking green and red lights. I'd pay extra if it answers questions by printing out a thin strip of paper.


(1962)

I thought, I work hard and deserve some fun. So I went on Craigslist for my area, found "Escort Services" and placed an order. I said my requirements were something clean, quiet and fun, not too flashy. And an hour later, there was a knock on my door.

( The Escort )

Yes, language has changed a smidgeon since the 1930s.

Hey, there's nothing in here about the Latin Kings, what a ripoff.

This is all about men and women dating, where's the gay romance?

Not a single drug-related story, I'm writing them a letter of complaint.

Honestly. I happened to come across this at one in the morning on a cold windy night, and it gave me The Willies. Yikes. Whoever wrote this really knows how to push psychological buttons.

Be sure to take a few minutes to visit Elzie Crisler Segar Memorial Park. Pay your respects to one of the great storytellers of the 20th Century and his most famous creations.. a sailor who has brought joy to the young and the young at heart for seventy years. This bronze statue was sculpted by Robert L Walker. Perhaps you could leave a single spinach leaf at the base of the statue. (And buy someone a hamburger while you're in town.)

Here's the back page of MR NATURAL# 1, 1970. One of thing about Robert Crumb in his prime, he was eclectic. There was a good deal of bitterness and shock value in his work from the start, but he also was capable of pulling something like this in from nowhere.

As always, you kind of take your chances when you click on these. Something adorable, something atrocious, it could go either way.





( ? )

____

From November 1949, this was much better and very different than what I expected. 1949 was after all the Twilight of the Pulps when the great heroes were winding down, and I thought a new character introduced at that late point would likely be just a lame rehash of earlier ideas. Nope. This exploit of Captain Zero is told with gentle irony and deflating humour, presenting a hard luck hero for whom nothing ever quite goes as planned. (The first time we meet him, a guy promptly shoves Zero down a hill, to the sound of thumps and breaking branches.) In a lot of ways, the story reminded me of early Marvel superheroes like Spider-Man with their worries about money and girls, not to mention a tendency to goof up at crucial moments.

CITY OF DEADLY SLEEP (another irrelevant title) was the first of only three exploits which Zero was to have in his brief career. G. T. Fleming-Roberts is tasked with telling us the saga of Lee Alleyn, a crimefighter called Captain Zero who involuntarily turns invisible every night from midnight to dawn. Instead of making Zero an awesome avenger with deductive genius and fighting skills a Shaolin monk would envy, though, Fleming-Roberts cleverly confounds our expectations. Alleyn is an unimpressive little blonde guy, described as five feet four, wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses and working for a not so great metropolitan newspaper... not as a crusading investigative reporter but as a staff copy writer.

Not a guy you or I would likely fantasize being in our daydreams. Alleyn is smitten with the succulent reporter Doro Kelly but she is blithely oblivious to him. Just to rub catsup on a cold sore, Doro is increasingly interested in this invisible vigilante called Zero, whom she pictures as big, tall and virile, and probably good-looking when he`s not translucent. Wouldn't you know it? And every time Alleyn seems to be getting Doro to warm up to him just a bit, midnight is near and he has to make a lame excuse and scoof off so he can vanish. (Do you think Stan Lee read a lot of pulps? Is a bear Catholic?)

Captain Zero is investigating a series of unexplained murders which seem to have the common element of gambling in the background, and before you can sneeze, he's tangled up in an impending war between two vicious gangs for control of the rackets. Now, you might think that being completely invisible would be a big advantage to a crimefighter but Lee Alleyn goes about it all wrong. He announces his presence when it`s not necessary, alerting everyone he's there; instead of trying to be scary or spooky, he comes right out and says he's just a flesh and blood guy; and frankly, Alleyn is no tougher or more competent in a fight than the average joe would be and his attempts at intimidating repartee fall flat (he could have learned a lot by imitating that Shadow fellow on the radio).

In fact, despite his strange power, Zero spends much of his time trying to escape quick-thinking gangsters who sprinkle dirt on the floor to spot his footprints or who start carrying a water pistol filled with thin white paint. Alleyn isn't any great shakes at keeping a secret identity either, as both the main villain and the police chief rather quickly identify him.

None of this is a criticism. In fact, I rather liked the change of pace. ( read more )

No, not the old dude with the hat and glasses! The other guy...